The Husbands

The Husbands is a light-hearted book whose core premise is a marriage-themed time loop/multiverse situation: whenever Lauren's husband goes into the attic, an entirely new husband comes down instead, and reality warps itself so that this is the husband she's always had. Shenanigans.

This goes in a lot of directions I enjoyed. It explores the "what if" feeling of imagining what different relationships and lives would like with different people in them. There's funny montages of "nope not this one, nor this one, nope nope nope". There's a hilarious "is this husband cheating on me" scene. There's an incredibly awkward "oh I have a different job and I have no idea how to do it or even who my boss is" moment. There's also the nature of understanding who you are by seeing the ways you do and do not change in different multiverse situations.

Some of the time loop-esque bits reminded me of playing the game In Stars and Time recently, in the feelings of impermanence and loneliness through living a life that you can't share or record. There's also questions of how responsible you are for the state of other people's lives when you have reality-changing powers.

(That said, there were also some dark moments that I found quite discomforting; when reality can only be reset by getting one specific person into one specific attic, Lauren goes to some awful places a couple of times, knowing that whatever she has done will be un-done.)

Despite being a book about a magical series of marriages, I wouldn't say this is a romance book. Lauren's major character trait (to me, at least) is that she is pretty accommodating and so the book's core arc here is her learning about herself and what her wants are, now that she has the power to make reality-changing choices.